


Buried Treasure

by WandererRiha



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Caves, Gen, Gift Fic, Mako - Freeform, Partners in Crime, Turks - Freeform, buried treasure, subterranea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:35:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28056237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WandererRiha/pseuds/WandererRiha
Summary: Rude and Reno are sent to make sure everything in Banora is dead.Everything.
Kudos: 2
Collections: 2020 FF7 Secret Santa





	Buried Treasure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [j_marquis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_marquis/gifts).



> Prompt:  
> I didn't list ships because they are not necessary but I am inordinately fond of Reno/Rude. I have long thought that the Turks would be prime bait for a horror story, and I would very much like to see how they would react if they accidentally wandered into one of the more horrific aspects of Gaia. Put them against something unknowable and deadly, or simply a haunted house that they cannot leave. Scare me, and scare the Turks.

As Reno understood it, this was not the first time Shinra had had to reconstruct a company town. He and Rude had been around long enough to remember the old Chief and the rumors of what had happened to his family when the bombs fell on Kalm. Rather than rebuild, however, it had been decided to simply let Banora return to nature. The official answer had something to do with the mako table being super high which made the ground unstable for building. It was probably true in part; none of the bombed out houses had basements, which was probably why so few people had survived.

The dead had already been laid to rest. Reno liked to think that he and Rude had dug burial trenches and filled them in with as much respect and dignity as they could muster. The machinery usually meant for digging holes for trees and plowing fields for crops had certainly helped expedite the process. Didn’t make it less heartfelt if you didn’t use a traditional shovel, right? Either way, the dirty work was done, now it was just cleanup. Or so he had assumed.

“We gotta do _what_ now?” It wasn’t that Reno disapproved of the orders, he was simply perplexed.

“Corporate insists we examine the tunnels and reactor excavation site,” Tseng explained. “Evidently there is something important down there.”

“Like what?”

Tseng consulted his notes, consternation briefly creasing his brow. “All it says is ‘emerald’.”

“So like...there’s treasure or something down there?” This seemed unlikely.

“Only thing valuable and green down there is all that mako,” Rude agreed.

“Regardless, I’m going to need the two of you to do a cursory sweep of the designated areas. It’s decently mapped, just be aware of the mako tides.”

Accepting the map, Reno squinted at it and then passed it to Rude. “Right.”

\--

For someone who’d grown up underplate, Reno wasn’t terribly fond of subterranea. Still, Rude was with him, and they each had a flashlight and extra batteries, a good map, and a PHS each. Tseng knew where they were going. If they got turned around, they could always call- the tunnels weren’t _that_ deep underground- the reception might be shit, but Tseng would recognize the number and by association, their predicament.

The man-made tunnels weren’t too bad. It was reassuring that human hands had built the structures holding the roof up, had dug the shaft with as much accuracy as modern technology could afford. It made the deep dark knowable, familiar, in a way the winding wormholes of natural canyon were not. When steel and concrete gave way to glistening rock and a floor loose with sand and gravel, Reno paused. It felt wrong, somehow, to enter this opened vein of the planet.

“Reactor site’s up ahead,” Rude said into the stillness, voice echoing slightly off the rock. “Makes sense.”

“How so?”

“Gotta put it where the mako flows in and out. Figures a natural tunnel would be here.”

“Oh. Yeah. I guess.” Feeling as if he were breaking and entering- something that hadn’t bothered him since somewhere around grade school- Reno summoned his bravado and marched forward with as much determination as he could. Rude followed at his shoulder.

There was a watchfulness to the living rock, as if Gaia herself were eying them as they passed through her body. Reno shook himself. The hell? When had he ever waxed poetic- even mentally- about shit like that? Yet beside him, Rude seemed tense. Due to the darkness, he’d foregone his ubiquitous sunglasses. Without them, his eyes flicked from one point of endless shadow to another, anticipating an ambush at any minute.

None came. That almost made it worse. They’d run into a few creatures, but even with the mako muddying the sand underfoot, none of them had been that big or powerful. Reno had been forcing back vague notions of hideous mutated things with too many eyes and legs and teeth; the sort of abominations Hojo bred on the 68th floor. So far, however, so good. Surely it couldn’t be this easy, could it? Maybe he was just getting paranoid in his old age.

“This don’t feel right,” Rude muttered, voice low. The heavy silence made speech at anything much louder than a whisper feel forbidden.

“I know,” Reno agreed. “I swear we’re bein’ watched, but I haven’t seen any cameras, or anything big enough to give off a predatory vibe.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“You and me both, buddy.”

They crept through the cavern in silence, the tunnel of green-coated rock stretched out endlessly before and behind them. It gave the illusion that they were not making any progress at all; like one of those dreams where you ran and ran but never got anywhere. Reno had to beat back the instinct to break into a sprint. Rushing off into the darkness would be not just stupid, but dangerous.

“The fuck _are_ we?” Reno hissed.

Rude pointed his flashlight at the map, sunglasses perched on his head, squinting at the fine print. “We should be comin’ up on the reactor site.”

“It feels like we’ve been walking for hours.”

“Kinda like the service tunnels in Midgar. Just feels longer ‘cause it’s dark and it all looks the same.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Daylight stabbed sudden and striking through the gloom. Rude dropped his sunglasses back into place against the sudden glare. Beside him, Reno breathed a sigh of relief. It was evident at a glance why a reactor would never have been viable despite the high mako table. The drill team had punched through the ceiling of an enormous aquifer, formed not of rock but of calcified mako. The soil surrounding it was soft and sandy when it wasn’t full of jagged rocks. The vaulted ceiling of the materia cavern would never have been able to support the weight of a reactor, no more the soft soil below. The whole thing would have sunk into the earth, never to be seen again.

Some structure had been put in place before Shinra gave it up as a bad job. Steel beams and concrete footers formed a rusty henge around a deep pool of raw mako. The foundations hadn’t been dug that long ago, but the concrete had already sunk several inches. In another ten years, they would vanish entirely, leaving only the spires of rebar stretching uselessly toward the sun. 

“Great. Found the glory hole. Now what?”

“Now…” Rude held up the map, waiting for his eyes to adjust. “This way.”

Reno followed him into a side-tunnel, doing his best to mentally mark from which hole they had emerged. At least six such tunnels circled the primary ditch, leading away into the endless dark of underground.

The earth squelched underfoot, sand spongey with mako. The thick treads of their boots made sucking sounds that seemed both loud and indecent in the suffocating silence. For a while the sun shone at their backs, then they turned a corner and were alone in the dark again. Reno found himself walking closer to Rude, almost touching. To calm his nerves, he fingered the grip of his mag rod. It wasn’t a GPS or a trained guide, but it was something.

On and on through endless dark, the too-sweet tang of mako growing stronger with every step, their path sloping gently yet steadily downward. The air had become thick and damp, and Reno fancied he tasted salt as well as mako.

“Think we’re below sea level?”

The cavern ceiling had begun to drip. Why did it have to be caves? Give him solid man-made construction any day of the week.

“Maybe,” was Rude’s short reply. He waved his flashlight beam into the gloom, exposing a rectangular cut in the natural rock. 

“Through there.”

Reno almost wept for joy and hurried forward into the blessedly artificial tunnel. Rough concrete and exposed rebar around him eased the tense feeling in his chest and shoulders. Skilled, competent hands had put this here for ease and safety. The feeling of being watched lessened slightly within the manufactured walls. Reno was not a terribly religious or superstitious person, but he had a healthy respect for natural disasters. One did not fuck with mother nature, and she surely had some strong words for Shinra regarding the large hole now far behind them. And the mass murder of Banora. Gaia was probably pretty pissed about that too.

 _That wasn’t us,_ Reno thought. _Well, not me and Rude personally._ He got the feeling it made precious little difference. The security of the man-made tunnel didn’t last. Eventually it let them out into natural cavern again. Reno stumbled to a stop, suddenly up to his ankles in liquid. The smell suggested it was mako.

“What’d the Chief say about mako tides?” Reno asked.

Rude squinted at the ground and trained his flashlight along the walls looking for a watermark. There wasn’t one.

“Let’s finish this quick,” Rude said, sweeping his flashlight’s beam through the darkness. He paused, swung back.

“What the hell is _that?_ ”

A darker shape loomed in the endless black, huge and jagged. So far stalagmites had been minimal, and of the standard round-and-lumpy variety with the occasional jagged materia crystal here and there. This was different. This was massive, taking up the bulk of the enormous vaulted cavern. It was also oddly symmetrical and seemed artificial, almost manufactured when viewed against the spears of crystal and mounds of smoothly curving rock surrounding it.

“Dunno,” Reno muttered, wading closer and hoisting himself up onto a low plateau of rock so that he was no longer up to his knees in mako. Wait. Knees? Shit. Better make this quick.

“Map says this is where the emerald we’re supposed to be lookin’ for is located.”

Reno shone his flashlight beam at it, edging nearer still. “Well, it _is_ green, but so’s everything else down here.”

Below him, the ground rumbled.

“Reno, leave it alone.”

“I ain’t touched it!” Reno protested.

The ground trembled again. Red and yellow light flickered along the twin mounds half-buried in rock and mako. A shout echoed behind him and Reno whipped around.

“Rude!”

He jumped down only to be swept immediately off his feet. The once still mako rushed along in a riptide as vacuous as a black hole, pulling him under and away. Mako was breathable. Academically, Reno knew that. Practically, he held his breath and fought against the current, clawing the bottom for purchase. Wait. The mako had only been knee-deep. Using the current as a method of holding himself up, Reno found his knees and then his feet, managing to stand his ground against the flood of mako.

“Rude!” he shouted into the blackness. “ _Rude!_

The mako wasn’t that deep, but it was moving swiftly and neither of them could swim.

“Here!” Rude called somewhere off to his right. Reno sloshed in that direction.

“Where you at?!” Reno hollered. “Keep talkin’!”

“I found the door,” Rude called, voice echoing. “The concrete one. Move it, the mako’s gettin’ higher!”

Reno flailed in the dark, fingers laying hold of the damp fabric of Rude’s sleeve.

“Rude!”

“I gotcha,” Rude grabbed his arm, one big hand almost large enough to span Reno’s bicep. “C’mon, back through here.”

“You still got the map?”

“No. Lost my light. How ‘bout you?”

“Still got my mag rod, but that’s it.”

“It’ll have to do.”

Pulling the mag rod from its holster, Reno shook it off and switched it on. Static crackled and glowed, casting jagged shadows that flickered and danced against the tunnel walls. This time, he didn’t hesitate to grab Rude’s arm and hang on tight. Already the mako was rising over their shoes. For some reason he had thought it would rise calmly, like filling a bathtub. Instead, it mimicked the surrounding sea, rushing in waves and torrents, crashing against its confines to flood out into the tunnels.

“You got any idea where we’re going?”

“Up?” Rude suggested. There was nowhere else to go.

Mercifully, the cavern had few side tunnels, all of them smaller and at right angles to the main passage. Still, it would have been all too easy to blunder down one of them with only the fitful light of the magrod and the rising mako with which to see. It was becoming hard and harder to walk, the mako had risen almost to their knees again despite the steady upslope of the tunnel.

Reno shrieked out of pure reflex as the current constantly pulling against them suddenly sucked him down. He was saved from washing away into the darkness by Rude’s grip on his arm, fingers clenching tight enough to bruise.

“You okay?” he asked as Reno coughed and sputtered.

“Yeah,” Reno gasped, clinging to Rude. Except now they had no light at all, only the eerie luminessence of the mako itself. It was enough to see the outline of the walls, and the endless wormhole of black that stretched both before and behind them.

Rude was bigger, heavier, taller, and Reno hung onto him, struggling to keep his feet now that the mako was nearly waist-deep. Surely they were close to the old reactor site. At least then they could see the sun, could in theory climb the scaffolding of the aborted reactor until the tide went down. Reno refused to entertain the thought that the mako might rise higher than the half-finished tangle of steel.

Already Reno’s thoughts felt loud, as if he had his earpiece in and too many people were chattering on the same channel. Turks didn’t have to worry about mako poisoning the way SOLDIERs did, but he’d heard the horror stories, read the pamphlets that were handed out to every Shinra employee whether they worked for SOLDIER, the Science Department, or somewhere else entirely. Too much mako could loosen one’s soul, cause a person’s consciousness to drift from their body. In essence, one could return to the planet without ever actually dying. How much was too much depended on the person, and Reno had _zero_ desire to find out what his limit was. Given the noise flooding his head, it seemed likely that he was nearing his max.

“You’re head gettin’ loud?” he asked, voice echoing over the rising mako creeping up toward their chests. It took their combined efforts to trudge against the tide attempting to swallow them back.

“Little bit,” Rude admitted. “We gotta be there soon.”

The cavern rumbled around them, the noise that of an elder god yawning in its sleep. The mako frothed and surged around them, lifting them off their feet and shoving them forward at a rapid rate.

“Hurry!” Rude shouted, struggling to keep his head above the tide. “Before it sucks us back again.” Neither of them could do much more than tread water. They splashed and struggled, reaching for the bottom and finding none as the current yanked them forward. Reno shouted in joy and promptly choked on a mouthful of mako. Ahead, sun slanted down from a hole in the ceiling. They’d reached the glory hole.

“We made it!”

Rude’s only reply was a panicked gurgle. Reno grabbed him by the jacket collar to try to hold him up.

“C’mon, try to grab a beam!”

No sooner had they laid hands on the rusted steel than the current changed direction, the many tunnels exuding mako forcing the rising tide into a whirlpool of green. Wet and slippery, they did their best to climb up the scaffolding. They sat there for a moment, thoughts and voices not their own echoing loudly inside their heads. Below them, the mako rose higher. How the hell were they gonna get out of this?

Rude put an arm around Reno, who had begun to sway dangerously.

“You okay, man?”

“What?” Reno shook himself, a decidedly greenish cast to his fair skin. “Yeah, sure. Peachy.”

Rude has his doubts about that. No PHS, no flash lights, no mag rod. They _could_ wait for the mako to go down and walk back- provided they could find the exit and Rude wasn’t at all sure that he could. Besides, they had no idea how high the mako would rise. With their luck, it would come all the way up to the ceiling and perhaps higher, to breach the surface. Tseng may or may not have begun looking for them. Even if he had, how would he ever know where to look? Rude didn’t want to die down here, but it wasn’t looking good. Below them, the cavern rumbled yet again, making the beam they crouched on shudder. Reno flailed, thrown off-balance. Rude grabbed him, pulling him close.

“I gotcha.”

Shit, what were they going to do? Reno need a Cure, or an Esuna, or something; a towel at the very least. If they’d had any sort of magic-type materia, they could have sent up a fla-- Wait.

The mako was almost level with the beam. Rude had never been much good at magic, that had always been Reno’s department.

“Reno,” Rude shook him gently.

“Nhg…” Reno said, starting back to the waking world and blinking deliberately.

“Reno we gotta signal Tseng. Think you could channel something with all this?” he nodded at the mako flood threatening to drown them. Reno stared at it, squinting and widening his eyes by turns as he fought for focus.

“Never tried it with liquid materia before,” he mused. “Guess it’s not much different.”

Reaching, he extended a hand to touch the surface. Rude held tight to him so he wouldn’t fall in.

_Please, get us out of here._

The surface of the mako crackled with energy, sparkling and alive. There was a blinding flash, a deafening _BOOM_ and Rude felt himself plunged underwater. He held tight to Reno, unwilling to lose him in the flood. If this was it, they weren’t going into the Lifestream alone. There was no use struggling against a current that dragged them as they’d caught their coattails in the door of a speeding car. There was a splash, and a thud as Rude’s back connected with something immobile and _hard_. Breath driven from his lungs, all he could do was lay there and gasp.

Blinking the mako out of his eyes, he noticed a fountain of green several yards away. A mako geyser. Something limp and heavy lay on top of him: Reno, senseless from mako exposure. Slowly, painfully, Rude sat up and gave a shaky laugh.

“Sonnovabitch. You did it.”

The crush of footsteps on sandy soil made him start and turn. Tseng stood just behind them.

“I take it you found it.”

Rude nodded. “Yessir. Just like I said. Only thing down there green and valuable is all that mako.”


End file.
